Open Door to operate daytime shelter for unhoused Wausau residents

Damakant Jayshi

The Wausau Finance Committee on Tuesday approved additional funding to support efforts to help the city’s unhoused population find shelter during daytime hours.

An additional $50,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funding will go to Catholic Charities to support the Open Door, 319 Fourth St., Wausau helping fill the daytime gap that currently exists in Wausau. This additional amount under a “budget modification” will allocate the amount to the Catholic Charities “to provide administrative oversight and support” to the nonprofit, which provides “temporary help to current and newly released inmates,” among other services. The organization serves about 1,000 people each year, according to its website.

Wausau Police Chief Benjamin Bliven told the Finance Committee that the change would allow the allocation to transfer from Catholic Charities to the Open Door.

The Wausau City Council previously approved $540,000 to operate the 24-hour warming center for two years and $237,990 for a daytime center for the similar period. Both efforts were to be run by Catholic Charities, but now it will be directly responsible only for the warming center.

Bliven said after Catholic Charities took on the initiative, the organization realized the heavy lift the effort would take and began conversations with Open Door, an organization that has been operating locally for more than a decade. In the past few years, Open Door has opened their doors during extreme weather days and have the basic infrastructure in place to move forward, Bliven said.

After the Finance Committee’s decision on Tuesday, the revised budget for Catholic Charities for operating nighttime warming center and for its administrative support for the Open Door for the day center is $590,000. The budget covers nighttime center’s cost until Dec. 31, 2024.

The Open Door day center would operate from March 1 to Dec. 31, 2024 with a budget of $239,119. The total adjusted budget, if approved by the City Council, will now be $829,119.31, an increase of $51,129.

Lisa Rasmussen, who chairs the Finance Committee, said the operation of the day center will relieve some of the pressure around the library and a few other places in the city. She said since both the committee and the council had approved the budget, this was just a budget change and there was no need for any additional ranking for ARPA funds.

Rasmussen said the two organizations working together makes sense.

“To have that knowledge base…coupled with the administrative resource of Catholic Charities, who do this all over the state, I think it’s super helpful to have those two resources come together,” she said.

Last year, the Wausau Police Department said they received numerous complaints about homeless residents from business establishments in the downtown area and the library – that they were aggressively panhandling, loitering, fighting and using public spaces for urination and defecation. 

Since then, Wausau has taken several measures including creating a new position of community outreach specialist, a homeless liaison official, at the police department.